Sunday, May 31, 2009

Yesterday I was helping my brother Scott and his wife Leslie with a landscape account they have in Brewster, Mass on Cape Cod. In addition to mowing and trimming the lawn, edging and cleaning leaves out of the flower gardens; the owner wanted us to take down a dead pine tree from his back yard.

The pine tree was fairly sizable being about fifty feet tall and a couple feet in diameter. Scott had a rope that he threw across one of the upper tree branches and I held this rope while he used his chain saw to fell the tree so that the rope tension would help guide the tree to the area where we wanted the tree to land. The tree came down and I had to quickly jump out of the way by sliding to my left as the tree just missed me. As the tree fell it landed on part of a branch from another tree which snapped off and just grazed me.

Scott then cut the tree up into smaller sections and I took these tree sections further into the woods in back of the owner's house. As I was carrying one of the tree logs and getting ready to throw this log into the woods I had my mouth open and a small piece of wood or tree bark went right into my mouth and straight back to the end of my mouth past my epiglottis (mouth punching bag). I was worried that this piece of wood would get down my throat and get caught in my wind pipe as the wood was too far down my throat for me to try to cough it up. I quickly decided that the best thing to do in this circumstance was to swallow this wood and hope my stomach would take care of it without ripping up my insides.

After swallowing and eating this wood I went to my car and drank some water to try to help the wood along its way. When I got home I drank a couple 'Diet Cokes" as I had seen somewhere that cola products have been known to dissolve metal if the metal is left in the cola for a long enough time. I figured drinking the "Diet Cokes" couldn't hurt and I usually drink "Diet Coke" "Just for the taste of it".

Hopefully for me things will work out "ok" as this is the first time I have eaten wood. So far so good. This wood eating adventure was not planned and I don't intend to eat any more wood in the future. I'll leave any wood in the future that I come across to the beavers and termites of the world. I myself just didn't like the taste.